Who owns computers

Sleep Statistics UK []. Dell vs HP [ Comparison]. Huion vs Wacom [ Comparison]. Digital Marketing Statistics UK []. How to Start a Video Game Blog. How to Screenshot on Mac [] — Simple Guide. Texting Statistics UK [ Edition]. Before we begin, you should check out these statistics: In , there were almost 2, households in the UK with at least one computing device.

Statistics conducted in show that 3 million people purchased a desktop computer 12 months prior to the survey. Segments of the PC market are increasing in sales value more than others: the amount of PC gaming device shipments worldwide is expected to reach over 61 million units by Worldwide gaming laptop sales alone have reached a revenue of 11 billion U.

The gaming industry drives many innovations in PC design, as personal computers are often used for such focused tasks. PC utilization PCs have been used for many activities, such as watching online videos, playing computer games, and completing work tasks. Though computers or laptops are still among the most used devices to watch online videos among users worldwide, smartphones are now used more frequently in many different contexts.

One of the advantages of using PCs was its connectivity, as internet usage was possible through the high-speed fixed broadband connections desktop computers offer. Yet now, with the advent of 5G technology , growing mobile broadband might decrease the stationary use of PCs even further. Loading statistic Show source. Download for free You need to log in to download this statistic Register for free Already a member?

Log in. Show detailed source information? Register for free Already a member? More information. Other statistics on the topic. Software Operating systems market share of desktop PCs , by month.

Consumer Electronics Global market share held by tablet vendors Hardware PC vendor shipment share worldwide , by quarter. Hardware Global market share held by PC vendors Thomas Alsop. Research expert covering the global hardware industry. Profit from additional features with an Employee Account. You own your computer, of course. You bought it. You paid for it. But how much control do you really have over what happens on your machine? It used to be that only malicious hackers were trying to own your computers.

Whether through worms, viruses, Trojans or other means, they would try to install some kind of remote-control program onto your system.

Now, things are not so simple. There are all sorts of interests vying for control of your computer. There are media companies that want to control what you can do with the music and videos they sell you.

There are companies that use software as a conduit to collect marketing information, deliver advertising or do whatever it is their real owners require. And there are software companies that are trying to make money by pleasing not only their customers, but other companies they ally themselves with. All these companies want to own your computer.

Adware, software-as-a-service and Google Desktop search are all examples of some other company trying to own your computer. And Trusted Computing will only make the problem worse.

Remember the Sony story: The most insecure feature in that DRM system was a cloaking mechanism that gave the rootkit control over whether you could see it executing or spot its files on your hard disk. By taking ownership away from you, it reduced your security. If left to grow, these external control systems will fundamentally change your relationship with your computer.

They will make your computer much less useful by letting corporations limit what you can do with it. They will make your computer much less reliable because you will no longer have control of what is running on your machine, what it does, and how the various software components interact.

At the extreme, they will transform your computer into a glorified boob tube. You can fight back against this trend by only using software that respects your boundaries. Use open-source software — software created and owned by users, with no hidden agendas, no secret alliances and no back-room marketing deals.

This essay originally appeared on Wired. It seems that some of my examples were not very good. Tags: antivirus , control , copyright , DRM , e-mail , essays , malware , Microsoft , network security , operating systems , rootkits , Sony , spyware , Symantec.

An eye-opening piece if it were on NYT or something. I suppose, your target audiance probably know much of this well already. Have you thought about writing in a more non-techie medium? This was the main reason for switching to Linux back in the day it was not so easy to do so. But I am pleased i did now.

Then will you be able to connect to iTunes or use online payment options if you are using Linux? I did not know that security could be so much fun. In the last few post I found out about boob tubes and recipies for chocolate. A good lough every day keeps the doctor away. I think the issue here is that companies providing free software think of the world with the same model as a commercial TV station: the viewer or software user is the PRODUCT, not the customer.

The customer is the advertiser wanting to get to them. I use Ubuntu Linux, primarily for this exact reason. Agreed, Bruce could do a lot of good by seeking more mainstream exposure for this kind of piece. But we can also do our part by sharing them with our friends and associates. Factually incorrect statement there Bruce. A senior security strategist at MS posted a blog entry stating that the windows vista firewall turned off nonsense was just that, non-sense.

I am getting closer and closer to the day when I sit down with my wife and go over the basics of Ubuntu so we can make the switch.

Additionally, they are close to losing some big enterprise clients due to patching difficulties and security issues. And software is not owned but licensed. How many people really read and understand the implications of software licenses? One nit, though. Surely they have the right to deliver you their marketing messages and to stop you from preventing them from doing so in return for this free service that they develop, deploy, and maintain?

Maybe the best way to solve this problem would be for most individuals to stop owning computers. Nice essay, i agree most things are known by many. It is truly unfortunate that mainstream computing has ended up in such a pathetic state. I will never forget the day that I accidentally clicked on a rouge hyperlink somewhere in an ad, and found my clean, guarded, but unprotected Windows install irrevocably contaminated.

I still use Windows, but only on those rare occasions when it is required by some particular application. I simply do not trust Microsoft.

And the idea that I need to supplement my OS with various applications to protect myself from malicious code is ridiculous. Microsoft could have written Windows and IE differently, but they chose not to. The situation reminds me of the typical opinions held regarding the government. It is similarly unfortunate that government officials and agencies are generally considered to be corrupt and untrustworthy.

Whether or not that is actually true is not the point; I am simply stating that it is unfortunate that we live in a world where most people assume that that is true, at least to some extent. In the same way, Microsoft is considered generally untrustworthy and greedy.

But, i can see why MS wanted IE to work like a shell. But it was a very wrong decision. If left to grow, these external control systems will … make your computer much less reliable. That rather depends how reliable my computer is at the moment. And if we want people to consider that list seriously, software must be user-friendly enough to minimize the trauma of migrating to something new. Seems if you have to use Winders, this is a good article covering the possibility although remote of securing it.

You have to trust any software you install on your systems. Unless you spend months analysing the source of each application you install on your system — including the operating system — you have to trust the word of its authors, and the experience of its users, same as you do with non-OSS.

The advantage of a Live CD is that when you re-boot the machine, all of the cookies and any spyware that managed to get into RAM just… ahem… evaporates. Recently secure processors have become popular eg. IBM Security blue , where the users of the computer themselves cant read the contents of memory since it is encrypted using a secret on chip key.

There were 11, distinct providers in the census. Zipcode postal code. Everybody with a computer did something different. The poor will not have been lifted up, however. Perhaps running a VMWare client with a non-persistent virtual disk image that discards all the changes when you stop the virtual machine would achieve the same goal?

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Excellent post. Having outbound filtering be configured by an OS account essentially means that once you root the box you can just change the filtering rules, so the protection is minimal. I do this in some instances. Excellent article Bruce. This is not entirely correct. The ownership still remains with the original author or in most cases with the person who has been authorized marketing the licenses.

In the perception of the owners! There, you can almost do whatever you like with the software, yet you cannot obtain the original copyright. I run the free version of ZoneAlarm. Sure, the NY Times could link to this stuff, but what percentage of people who read the Times look at their blogs? Bear in mind that a lot of people are still reading that paper on paper.

The point is that it has a lot of readers, people who could benefit from seeing this information. You have to harden the host OS for the case that you catch a worm in the guest that automatically spreads over the network. It is a distribution license. The user practically owns the software for his personal use. When I made the switch, the reasons were entirely technical — I had gotten tired of an aging, slow, unstable Windows desktop.

All technical reasons aside, one of the biggest impacts this transition has had on me is that it has really woken me up to what free software really means. This means that I started with a live-cd that contained nothing but a minimal bootable Linux environment, and a tarball with a compiler collection.

I then watched Gentoo compile the entire operating system including its new compiler from source. So to state that linux is more secure is simply not true based on that standpoint. If more people will use a linux environment on their desktop, there will be also more exploits and the later on linux desktops. Also note that I never said a thing about security; the Torvalds quote is talking about a social movement — not software vulnerabilities.

This is something that is fundamentally at odds with Microsoft and their products. Windows is a war-zone, and the sad thing is that its users suffer the casualties. Every system can be compromised, some quicker than others. In that case switch to BSD. They want easeness instead of figuring out why their favorite software doesnt run on linux, i guess there will always be two camps, the programmers one and the endusers one.